Assistance of Online Travel Website OTA and 3D Earth Software in Course Teaching of Geography of Air Transportation

The teaching mode of many courses was converted to remote online live teaching in the spring semester of 2020 due to COVID-19. The application of the new network technology is a new experience for both teachers and students and provides new attempts at more teaching methods. The geography of air transportation is an important specialized course in the study of air service, tourism management, civil air transportation and other disciplines, which has been accompanied by many difficulties in geographic knowledge and the difficulty in spatial imagination of students in the teaching. In response to such problems, this paper conducted a research on the innovation of teaching methods. Freshmen from an undergraduate class majoring in tourism management at Beijing City University were selected and provided with course teaching of the geography of air transportation under the assistance of an online travel website OTA and 3D earth software, achieving good teaching results. The study found that the 3D earth software could help students understand difficulties in geographic knowledge in the three-dimensional space and master the IATA zoning and ten major route directions and that the online travel website OTA could help students familiarize themselves with airline names and their two-character codes, airport names and their three-character codes and the knowledge about flight transfers and thus deepen their understanding and mastery of the above geographic knowledge essentials.